1.1 Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method allowing and guiding the integration and migration of Business Applications (BA) executed on a data processing system into modern environments. In particular the present invention relates to a method of providing access to BAs executed on a data processing system wherein said BAs hitherto offer their services interactively controlled by a multitude of BA panels and wherein said BAs may display succeeding BA panels dependent on user interactions, user specified data and the contents of any kind of data base the BA is operating on.
1.2 Description and Disadvantages of Prior Art
Exploiters of information technology as well as information technology itself are confronted with a new dimension of flexibility and adaptability challenges for software supporting and controlling their business. Of course the software development techniques are confronted with these requirements too. On one hand business initiatives are the creators of these demands on the other hand information technologies themselves are the driving forces.
Companies are coping with new and changing market requirements. Improved customer services and time-to-market are key differentiators. Globalization of markets, organizational changes like decentralization, new cooperations require new business structures and concepts. As an answer to these challenges companies are attempting to re-engineer the underlying business processes to a serious extend. Business application software encompassing a huge spectrum of different application types, like Online Transaction Processing Applications (OLTP), data base applications etc., has an important supporting and enabling element in this arena it has to follow these tracks. The situation is even worse as information technologies themselves undergo drastic changes by offering new technologies like Client/Server, multi-media and object-oriented (OO) technologies.
Various approaches are known as attempt to integrate, to migrate or to adapt existing BAs to these changes in general and to OOT in specific, as OOT becomes more and more important and is believed to be the unifying approach for accessing other types of new technology.
If the origins of a given application are dated back many years and sometimes even more than a decade and if technologies have been subject of dramatic evolution, a first impulse might suggest to abandon these types of legacy applications, as an adaptation with respect to the new technologies like client/server concepts etc., these applications haven't been prepared for, seems hopeless.
No doubt that this kind of approach might be reasonable in certain situations. The decision to “throw away” a legacy application often is a hasty response. Searching for alternatives allowing to “reuse” the legacy applications is worthwhile as they contain valuable knowledge on the business they are supporting. Many person-years would have to be spent for their re-implementation. Also as many companies rely in a vivid sense on their business supporting applications such discontinuities may not be acceptable and more evolutionary approaches may be favorable instead.
Modernization of legacy applications by restructuring could be an alternative attitude. As a result this concept often requires great investment in the old application itself whereas the “visible” effects of modern technologies are very modest compared to the overall effort. Sometimes restructuring an application actually led to a completely new implementation. If on the other hand this “hidden” re-implementation is to be avoided typically one is limited with respect to the freedom of designing the characteristics of the new application structure.
Another approach in this arena, called “face-lifting”, concentrates on the user interfaces of existing BA exclusively. This type of approach is limited to just renovate the panel driven user interfaces attempting to realize user interfaces showing more proximity with modern graphical user interfaces available on personal workstations. An important flaw of this type of approach is its inability to modify the execution sequence inherent in the existing panel flow.
1.3 Objective of the Invention
The invention is based on the objective to generate and execute access structures for executing BAs, which offer their services interactively controlled by a multitude of BA panels, avoiding the handling of the multitude of individual panels explicitly by a user. The same method should hold also for the case that the BAs are executed on a remote data processing system, i.e. not on the same system requesting the services of the BAs.